Platform: Nintendo Switch
Released: April, 2019
Publisher / Localization: CIRCLE Ent.
Developer: yeo  

Sometimes I get really busted up about how much time I don’t have for playing videogames. The new ones that come out all want me to be the game I play forever – we’ve been doing that song and dance since 2008. I don’t think there’s a single game from the time that we started doing this with videogames that I’ve really played beyond a few months.

Forever videogames want us feeling aligned with the world. All about maps that are so massive they’re getting their own zip codes, filled with collectibles and charms and all of this kinetic junk just floating around. Kinetic Junk is the term you use to describe things you pick up, collect, walk over, that are really only there to chime or jingle or glow and pop into nothingness.
The feedback of exploring a world ideally should be the experience itself. When a game developer doesn’t do that, there’s kinetic junk.

Ringo Ishikawa presents itself plainly, and in the opening moments. It gives you a world to inhabit – purely because the developer knew that to keep someone playing forever, you make a world worth just hanging out in. I pass the time by reading books, or walking around the neighborhood.
The map for Ringo Ishikawa could be detailed in a single sheet of college-ruled notebook paper. For that reason, it is exactly like the games it emulates.

What does it mean to hang out? This is a personal anecdote, but for me it has to be a world worth not just spending time in, but one worth wasting time in. I have never beat a specific Final Fantasy game I am thinking of. I will let you puzzle it out here: but I have wasted innumerable hours hanging out in its world, watching.

Highschool is the perfect setting for a videogames. It is (for most of us) the first place anyone experiences that is so large. Everyone you know is at a greasy point between malleability and knowing who they are. Roleplaying games use highschool as a setting because it’s the perfect place to trade in personality and relationships.

Most of these games – let’s say Persona, are about min-maxing to take advantage. The caveat of RPG systems being so inundated with numbers going up is that making that tied to people means you’re going to always want to game relationships for the best possible outcome.

Ringo Ishikawa pulled things out from under me. If you’re like me, I went in thinking “oh I know this” and immediately started trying to set my Highschool Delinquent on the path of education and training. The game immediately punished me by locking me out of conversation with a handful of characters.

This is the premise of Ringo Ishikawa that made me immediately fall in love with it. It is a role playing game but not an ‘RPG’. The role you are playing is of Ishikawa himself – but you’re meant to inhabit the role as it’s connected to the story. If you fight all of the gangs in the first week like they’re just videogame badguys, you’ll run aground almost immediately as your allies turn against you.

Ringo Ishikawa is slow and deliberate. It wants you to poke and prod at the borders of the world slowly. Trying to play it like any other similar game doesn’t really work. You actually need to have routines to your day – you need to know where things are and what people are interested in.

Focusing on routine – going to bed at a certain time, getting up before school so you have time to work out, Ringo Ishikawa made me enjoy the small moments. There are times when you want to just stare out at the city across the bay, and you can. You can do it all day if you want.

There are rare games that you’re allowed to just hang out in. There are even fewer where hanging out is an actual game mechanic – and Ringo Ishikawa is one of them.

We’re at the point in time where it’s clear that the concept of virtual reality is going to be mostly used for capturing the same type of experience videogames have before, but in first person.
Games like Ringo Ishikawa are important because they’re a reminder that videogames offer us ways of directly experiencing emotion. Sorry to sound all clinical – but Ringo Ishikawa is the only game I can think of where smoking cigarettes on your porch is not only an option, but you wont actively be punished for it.

I spent a lot of my early life hanging out doing nothing – I don’t feel upset about it. There are times of the day when you just want to watch the clouds pass by, and times of the day when you don’t know what you should be doing. Ringo Ishikawa is a lot of those moments, if you want them to be.

For someone else, it could be constant street brawls and slacking off between classes. There’s ample time in the world for ping pong and billiards – it’s something you learn when you get older.

Brawling in Ringo Ishikawa is a game of prediction – you can only raise your stats so much in the early game so you start to pick and choose which fights you think you can win. Sometimes, you do the unscrupulous (or is it in character?) thing and stand by while a group of rival gangs duke it out, stealing their cash after they taste pavement and picking off the stragglers alone.

This is the exact opposite of how you behave in Real Life. Ringo Ishikawa is not real life – but it is filled with the kinds of things that might happen to you in real life if you lived a certain way. More importantly, Ringo Ishikawa is a close translation of a particular kind of story.

In the beginning of the game, a character remarks to another one “You read too much manga.” The other character responds:

“Manga is the shit.”

-skeleton

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